Tuesday, April 10, 2018

Springtime in America

(Negativity
Alert! May Not Be Suitable For Children Or Right-Wing Snowflakes.)

There's
a new baseball season; the green fields are full of a new crop of
great young players. Anything can happen! This is always a time of
optimism in American culture. We all have our teams, and this is
their year! Each team is a mass of raw potential, like children. But
isn't it necessary to wait until the children mature to see the
difference between potential and the wishes of a sincere but
over-matched parent? In the end, only one team will win. Can we at
least count on that? There'll be playoffs at the appointed hour,
won't there? There'll be a World Series; isn't there always a World
Series? Can we be optimistic about that, at least?

I'm
not counting on anything this year. It's snowing in April, for crying
out loud.

This
is a new kind of “anything can happen.” All of the rules have
been thrown straight out the window. We have always been told that
America is a country of laws, that we are ruled by the law, that our
Constitution stands above everyone, and covers everyone with its
protective shadow. And its penumbra! We have been told that our
representatives and our public servants, from judges to spies, all
observe the same set of rules, and are all controlled by the majestic
logic and history of our great Constitution. Well, I'm afraid that
it's time to awaken from this wonderful dream, America.

The
Constitution turns out to have been a suicide pact all along, just
waiting for the gun-hand to come along. A vast game of Jenga, waiting
for the day when someone pulls out the wrong brick. Then comes a
brief period of the blocks collapsing noisily onto the table top, and
some laughing and crying out in surprise. We're still in the brief,
giddy chaos of the tower's disintegration. What comes next? I guess
there are three alternatives:

Put
the blocks back in the box;

Leave
them on the table and clear it all up some other time; or

Rebuild
the tower and play another game.

So,
what's it going to be, America? Our entire American Experiment in
democratic self-government is teetering on the edge of failure.
Nobody is playing by the old rules anymore, most of them are, in
fact, breaking the old rules openly. Great, wide swaths of our
Constitutional rights have been relegated to purgatories that stand
somewhere between the discarded and the disregarded. My own favorite,
probable cause, now means, in the words of a talented defense
attorney, “whatever the local District Attorney wants it to mean.”

No,
I'm not going to make a list of our problems. Either you know what
they are, or you will launch off into a glib explanation of why they
are not problems at all. Because, after all is said and done, our
only problems are Hillary and Obama, right? And the Jews, somehow
they always make the list, and the poor niggers (a word that is
unfortunately making a comeback among people who should know better),
who have never done anything but grace us with their contributions to
American culture, and the actors and academics of America, who are always accused of looking down on
the real Americans, and the Liberals, without whom all of these Trump
voters would be the sole support of their aging parents, and those
uppity coastal states, without whom the rest of America would be
reduced to subsistence farming, and those damn immigrants. Better be
careful, geniuses. If we did manage to kick out all of the
immigrants, we'd have to start sending raiding parties into Mexico to
draft farm labor.

The
map of our current Civil War that most people know best is Facebook,
where there is a contingent that sees pirates and charlatans grabbing
all of the levers of power, destroying our democratic institutions,
and stealing all of the money for themselves and their patrons, and
another contingent that sees strong American patriots finally
defining our problems in terms that normal people can understand.
Patriots identifying demonized groups whom they will be grinding into
dust with their heels presently. And just try and stop them! When all
of those groups have been eliminated, or maybe just humbled, America
can finally become the great, white, Christian nation that God and
the Founding Fathers intended! Everybody gets a big-screen TV and
plenty of channels, some guns, and a hunk of government cheese, and,
if the new bosses are clever, plenty of strong reefer so that the
unemployed masses can get a good buzz and watch re-runs of The
Walking Dead. For anyone who really wants a job, I'm sure there'll be
a lot of openings in the military, or McDonalds, or Walmart. (I'd say
Amazon, but they showed up on the Demon list recently.) There'll be
jobs for police, perfect for veterans who wish to continue working.
Maybe as corrections officers, guarding inmates doing slave labor up
at the prison. Or ICE officers, manning checkpoints.

Springtime
for America; winter for the American people. Is that the new dream?
You tell me.

No comments:

stat counter

About Me

Mr. C is: a reformed lawyer; a religious atheist; a useful "Handy Man;" an amateur social scientist; a beloved teacher; a well liked husband and father; Ambassador Emeritus from, and to, Planet X; a freelance professor; taxi driver to the stars (Joe DiMaggio and Ronald McDonald, both out of uniform); an excellent fire fighter; an enthusiastic but untalented musician; an experienced counselor; a top-notch disk jockey; an all around get-along-guy; a cunning linguist; a would-be lifestyle victim; a Masonic wannabe; a frequent reader; Professor Irwin Corey's Ph.D. adviser; an accomplished driver and motorcyclist; a famous rockologist; a reliable but indifferent bullshit detective; a poor speller; a proud United States Navy veteran (honorably discharged, barely); the Ayatollah of Ass-o-Hola; a drug legend; a Returned Peace Corps volunteer (Thailand); a generally charming man; nationally and internationally known from coast to coast; a legend in his own mind; a cultural-anthropological critic-at-large; an avenging angel who coolly bides his time; Soul Brother number 37; and a friend to the poor.